Retrograde: Doom

This is a head gun podcast.

Hey guys, it's really exciting here at id Software.

It's 1992.

We got a huge game coming out next year in Doom.

All we have to do is tweak a few more items on the

spreadsheet and we're good to go.

Basically, we're looking for the name of the weaponry in Doom.

Yeah, the ultimate gun you get, the most powerful gun.

I mean, because the gameplay is so on point.

I mean, this thing just plays like a dream.

So it's just a matter of like, you know, that little extra level of polish.

And let me just pitch a name for this thing.

Dick gun.

Okay, well, hold up, hold up.

Let's just.

Charlie,

I really appreciate you coming into these meetings hot and ready to go with your pitches, but I do feel like this is

not the first time that you've pitched dick gun as a weapon in a first-person shooter.

Okay, well, I just, you know, it's maybe not the pitch, but it's just that maybe it's the pitch that gets us to the pitch.

I don't know.

I'm just throwing an idea.

You pitch it every single time.

Okay, so, all right, fine.

Well, why have someone else throw out an idea?

I don't know.

We're trying to name these guns here.

Well,

I just want to, like, I've gone,

I hate to say this, but I, I've, I've got some

footage here.

I called up some of your former employers, and I have footage here of

other similar pitch sessions for other games.

And if you look here, I've got a clip here from when you worked at Nintendo.

Yeah.

Okay, everybody.

So we're looking for some new Mario power-ups for Super Mario Bros.

3.

Anybody got a pitch?

Mario, it's so cool that you're coming in person to these meetings.

I mean,

some video game stars would be too big for this.

Hey, you know,

I like getting my hands dirty in the work itself.

So who's got an idea for a Mario power-up?

Well, I say, you know, you got the mushroom, you got the fire flower, you got the invincibility star.

I mean, you got a lot of great ones already.

How about Dick Gun?

So as you can see from that clip that I just played,

you've been pitching this same idea for a long time.

Doom is going to open up an entirely new world of interactivity.

It's going to be a huge game.

So let's just hear some other thoughts.

You know, Matt, what do you got?

Well, you know,

had, I had a notebook filled with notes

earlier that seems to be missing from my desk.

And the only thing that's coming to mind right now, unfortunately, is dick gun.

A dick gun's pretty good.

And it's not because it's my idea.

I like that.

Yeah, no, that's it.

I wouldn't have come up with that, but I just keep hearing it.

And now it's like it's infected my brain, not unlike a virus.

Um, I'm trying to think of something else.

Pistol, shotgun, uh, like a gatling gun off the top of my head, those are some other guns.

Yeah,

we got the chain gun, we got the shotgun, we got the super shotgun, we got the pistol.

I mean, these are already, already taken care of.

We got the rocket launcher.

We're talking about the ultimate weapon here.

We're trying to name it.

The ultimate weapon.

Yeah.

So something in that in that family, like

the destroyer.

Or...

Yeah, yeah, the dick destroyer.

Yeah, no.

Yeah.

No.

Well, who's going to pick up that weapon?

Reminds me of Dick Destroy December, which always follows No Nut November.

What?

You don't know about Destroy Dick December?

HR has talked to you about that.

Oh, sorry.

I'm sorry.

I thought this was a space where we could just throw out ideas.

Your request for it to be a national holiday has been denied.

You know, we have no nut November, and then we got all this pent-up energy.

It goes straight into Destroy Dick December.

I think it's a pretty natural progression.

You know, there is a job opening at Duke Nukem.

Why don't you take that job?

Fuck, I'd be perfect for that.

I'd love to work in the Duke Nukem brand.

He's so funny.

He is so funny.

I heard he's cool, too.

I met him once.

What?

Saw him and I was like, hey, Duke, you're a handsome guy.

He's like, damn, I'm looking good.

I was like, he said it.

He said it.

He

said it.

I one time, I took a piss next to him at the urinal one time.

And he looked over at me and he said, I'm not even pissing.

I'm taking a shit right now.

His classic line.

It was crazy.

Yeah, that's Duke.

So I just want to clarify.

He was facing the urinal, shitting in his band.

He was holding his dick in his hand, doing like the urinal action, but he was shitting out of his ass.

Meeting adjourned, he was holding his dry dick and shitting his pants, standing at a urinal.

And they told you that's what he was doing.

I'm just gonna pack my stuff up.

All right, see you guys Monday.

Hey, we get to keep our jobs.

That's huge.

Yeah,

possible to get fired here.

We

and

as we discuss the father of first-person shooters, 1993's doom, this week on Get Playing.

Welcome to Get Played, your one-stop show for good games, bad games, and and every game in between.

It's time to get played.

I'm your host, Heather Ann Campbell, along with my fellow host, Tiger Weiger.

That's me, Tiger Weiger, along with our third host, Matt Apodaka.

Hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the premiere video game podcast, where this week, we're talking about the old school stuff.

Yeah, we're doing a little thing we're calling retrograde.

We're taking a look back at Doom, the 1993 Doom, not that newfangled 2016 Doom and not the new Doom the Dark Ages that is dropping this week.

We're going back to the OG, the father of FPS games.

We're kicking it old school this week.

We sure are.

We're in our old school era.

Now, full disclosure, Matt Abadaka has got a tiny bit of a cold.

Just a little bit.

So he's not in this studio with us, and Nick is sitting very close to me now.

That's right.

As a result.

Like, he's usually across the room.

And

as two people who I think have difficulty looking at other people,

it's a very strange proximity for us to have.

Neither of us is particularly comfortable with it, but it's what we're working with.

Yeah.

I also like that our color palette seems to be inverted because I've got like a tan.

Oh, yeah.

I kind of got the rust top,

this hoodie I got on.

And I've got a khaki bottom.

Yeah.

But anyway,

for listeners, this is the least exciting thing you'll hear all podcast until the very next thing.

Don't make any promises you can't keep, Heather.

Matt, you feeling okay?

You you hanging in there I feel just fine I just had enough of a little bit of a cold that I could tell it was not it would not be wise to uh you know

being in such small proximity right uh with people um so I decided to just play it safe and and stay home but I'm thriving I'm doing great over here I got a cup of tea right here oh wait what kind of tea you got uh it's just some like

stress and immunity tea i can't remember what the what it is, but I'm drinking it out of my Yoshi cup.

Cute.

Kind of looks like he's shitting those eggs.

I mean, who knows exactly what's going on there below the waist?

He has some sort of orifice that dispenses eggs.

Is it the same sort of orifice that dispenses fecal matter?

Is it like a cloaca for a bird?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Reptilian anatomy.

Is Yoshi a she?

I don't know if Yoshi's gender has been determined.

But Yoshi lays eggs.

Yeah.

And that's not a thing that that

boy dinosaurs did, to the best of our knowledge.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't, I have no idea if that the you know.

I think Yoshi has to be a she.

It's possible.

I mean, it says he's a boy.

Well, then that's exciting.

That's, that's, uh, I don't know.

That's very progressive.

I like it.

Go off.

I like that Yoshi's a boy who lays eggs.

Let's fucking go, Yoshi.

Birdo is a lady who shoots eggs.

That's fun.

Out of her mouth.

Yeah.

That'd be a bummer to witness.

We have a lot to talk about with Doom and other video games, but I guess we should start by talking about the semi-topical thing that happened this past week

as of this episode's release, the Grand Theft Auto VI trailer and the official May 26th, 2026 release date.

The quote, official release date.

The official release date.

I've heard or read online that the game is finished, that the main game,

the single-player campaign is completely done, totally playable, bug-free.

It is the

executives' insistence on an absolutely flawless day one online mode that is holding back the game.

I mean, that does make a lot of sense because there's so much backlash from a,

you know, and we forget about it, but, you know, obviously Diablo 3 was the big one of just like that day one launch was so disastrous.

And anytime something like that happens,

you know, there's such a backlash that takes a while to recover from.

So

I can understand that if that's actually what's happening, and that's not, that's not just, you know, online speculation.

It's nice to have the luxury that they can figure out, you know, like take as much time as they want to release this bad boy and make sure it's, you know, up to their internal standards because you know not all developers are able to do that, but they have pretty much the ultimate cash cow in Grand Theft Auto Online.

It's crazy that there have only been, I mean, there's been you know, Vice City and there's been

San Andreas and stuff, but generally the numbered

Grand Theft Autos have only been three

and then four, five, and six since the year 2001.

That's crazy to think of.

They sure take their time making them.

Again, it's nice to have that luxury, and I wish all developers were able to do that table to refine and polish things until they were

at a state where they were as

finished from the developer's perspective.

I did see a comment on the trailer that I isolated.

I am already 63 years old.

I probably will not see GTA 7.

Holy shit,

quickly?

How quickly the time flies in anticipation of a new part of my favorite game?

And the top reply to that is just, sorry.

I'm looking at

the Grand Theft Auto Wikipedia right now.

And yeah, from 2001

to 2013, we have Grand Theft Auto.

We have, you know, all the mainline Grand Theft Auto games, Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City, San Andreas 4, and then 5.

and then in the same amount of time,

it's been the same amount of time between Granted Auto V and Granted Auto VI that all of those games came out.

It's

insane to think about.

That is, that's sickening, white swath of time.

That's horrifying.

Sorry to that, man.

I'm a living corpse.

I don't know.

I kind of like it.

I kind of like that

this is becoming like a once-a-decade or once-a-decade-and-change sort of event.

It feels seismic, it feels

like

it's also just kind of

wild to see how video games have.

This is a trite thing to say, but to go back to Grand Theft Auto 1, which we've talked about on the podcast and which I've played,

I played back in the day on PC.

It's just like, that is just such an incredible gulf in terms of how games have progressed to what we're looking at in the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer.

That tricks some people into thinking it was live action.

Is that true?

Yeah, I read some people saying they're having that reaction.

Yeah.

Wow.

I was not at all.

That's very cool.

Yeah, I know.

I'm not fucking dumb, but some people want to parent.

You're a fucking idiot.

I have to say that I was not enticed by the trailer.

And I don't mean that to be, oh, Henry always takes the contrarian position.

I just don't see anything that sets it apart from Grand Theft Auto 5.

Which is similarly like,

I don't know.

I mean, it's been a long enough time since I played Five that I am no longer aware of the graphical fidelity of the game.

But my response to the trailer for Five was similar.

It was like, oh, wow.

And then I played it and I was like,

yeah.

It doesn't feel like a new game.

It's hard for me to tell much from...

The footage that was shown because

I can't really infer much about how it actually plays.

But I do kind of

would think that a lot of the player base just wants a better-looking Grand Theft Auto V.

I feel like a lot of people who are pretty content with the rock star formula.

I think the other thing is, like,

this game is targeted not at people who have podcasts about video games, this is targeted at the general public.

There are people who will just buy this game, there are people who don't own a PS5 now who will get one when Grand Theft Auto VI comes out because they got to play the new Grand Theft Auto.

So,

yeah, I don't know.

I mean, like, I don't think these games are ever really for me.

I think the last one I really, really got into probably was Vice City.

And, uh, you know, which speaks A to how fucking old I am, but B, just kind of how my gaming tastes have diverged from the general publics.

I kind of expect my, what I, with Grand Theft Auto VI, it will be kind of like what I did with Grand Theft Auto V, which I'll put, you know,

30 hours into and then just kind of be like, all right, well, I played that.

I don't know.

Matt, what do you think?

I mean, again, I'm not, I just want to be completely clear.

Like, this is, it's, it's really incredibly impressive what these

developers have been able to pull off.

Technically, it's stunning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, it looks great.

Um, I think what I've kind of the reaction I've seen online is people are sort of thinking that it kind of story-wise looks like it could be closer in tone to something like a uh Red Dead Redemption than a classic Grand Theft Auto, kind of like it has the Grand Theft Auto elements, but like the story could be a little more

a little darker, a little less goofy.

maybe a little, yeah, a little more sophisticated, a little more like, uh, you know, I guess not sophisticated is not the right word.

It's not going to be like

Downton Abbey or something.

It's going to be like, um, it looks a little, I don't know, it looks a little more, I guess, a little less silly, a little less like

Mark Luserberg or whatever, like the type of humor that they do and those types of things.

Um, but I'm a big fan.

I loved five.

Um, I've I've not played a second of Grand Theft Auto online.

That is not what I'm there for.

I just like a single-player story, you know?

Yeah.

So

I'll be looking forward to this when it comes out.

I'm actually really, you know, we're giving it a lot of grace.

I have Grand Theft Auto online, just a role-playing as a cop.

So I'm doing that all the time.

Yeah, making traffic stops.

It's kind of a generally enforced thing.

Pulling people over, shooting without reciprocity.

If Grand Theft Auto VI is like a really serious in-tone, like

heat-inspired crime drama,

then

I would be like, oh, this is a new kind of game.

Because nobody has, I mean, there have been dramatic crime games, but nobody's actually nailed like a, oh, this would be a fantastic television series.

Like a William Friedkin movie or something.

Yeah.

Gritty sort of crime, you know, drama.

Yeah, I mean, that would be interesting.

But

like, hey, you want to go down to Chuck's Big Dick Hot Dogs?

Grand Theft Auto.

See how many you can suck down.

I got to get my tires rotated at the shafty lube.

Grand Theft Auto V is heat from people who like, who love Scarface.

Like, do you know what I mean?

Where it's like, they're just like two very different.

things, but they think they're the same thing, kind of.

I think this could be more maybe heat-like, I hope.

I would love it.

I would love that.

I'm pumped.

I love Granthathato.

I wish it was coming out

when they fucking said it would.

God damn it.

Fucking big

guys.

Yeah.

Can't believe they're delaying this game.

No, I'm pissed.

I'll be happy to play it when I can get my grubby hands on it.

Assuming

we have electricity

in 2026 when it comes

How long was the

space of time, the span of time between the announcement of Final Fantasy vs.

13

and the release of Final Fantasy 15?

Because I want to say that it was not quite as long, but it was a very similar amount of time.

I have no idea off the top of my head.

Because

Final Fantasy vs.

13 was announced in 2007.

So when,

when was

when was 15, when did 15 come out?

I guess I could look at my phone like a, like a, like a journalist.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

But as far as the game's release date, I mean, it's just like you, you, you hear versions of this.

There's the one that got misattributed to Shigeru Miyamoto.

A delayed game is eventually good, but rush game is forever bad.

And I guess he never actually said that.

But the sentiment is, you know, like, I, I get why that got circulated and why that got attributed to

an unimpeachable game developer because it is true.

Gabe Newell had a similar one: late is just for a little while, suck is forever.

You know, so that's pretty good, too.

I've not heard such a good one.

Yeah, I like that one more, but I but I like, but I like the, I mean, like, it's like I always just take, take, yeah, take whatever fucking time you need to make these games.

Yeah, keep polishing.

So, Final Fantasy

Versus 13 was announced in 2006

and then released in 2016.

So that was a 10-year delay between announcement and release.

How long has it been since Grand Theft Auto VI was announced?

Which game has taken up more of my existence on planet Earth?

The answer is Duke Nukem Forever.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Duke Nukem Forever.

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I don't know when this was.

I have no,

again, I'd have to look it up when Grand Theft Auto 6 was originally announced, but

it's been 12 years since Grand Theft Auto V, and it'll be 16 before 6 actually releases.

But I hope it's good.

I hope so too.

Fucked.

Nobody's fucked.

We're doing great.

We're ruined.

We're doing great.

And just to circle back to,

you know, take as much time as you need.

We currently don't need more new video games.

We can wait for

point, Matt.

We can wait for one more for later.

That's fine.

We don't need any in the immediate right now.

We're good.

I'm not going to get to all the ones I already currently own.

Yeah.

So, like, let alone the new ones that are released this year.

So, yeah,

holding it till 2026 is.

I feel like I also read a Kojima quote about how all of the release dates had to move out of Grand Theft Auto VI's way when it was still going to come out this fall.

Yeah.

And that, and that that had created crunch in different games who had to be like, okay, well, we can't release after because that's going to be too long for our

books.

Yeah.

So we have to release before, which means we have to crunch.

And now there's just this giant vacuum of release date

in the fall of this year.

Didn't he say that that's why

Death Stranding 2 is coming out in June?

I think so.

Yeah.

Crazy.

Which, wow.

I did also read a quote from him, I think, today, where he was like, I'm just happy to be done with it.

He's like,

I want to be done with this.

The first impressions of Death Stranding 2 have come out as of record, and they are effusively positive.

So

I'm excited.

Can't fucking wait.

That'll certainly tide me over for 2025.

Also, a reminder, we're going to be doing our We Play, You Play of Mother 3 on Monday, June 2nd.

That's a game that Heather selected as a result of winning our Switch 2 release date bet.

It's a game that's very important to you, and we're all going to be playing it and giving our thoughts at length.

Even Ranch has started playing Mother 3.

That's true.

Wow.

And if you're at home thinking, when did Mother 3 come out?

It didn't.

But you can play it if you wink, wink, know where to look for it, wink, wink.

So please play along.

And if you don't know where that is, then just go to discord.gg/slash get played and maybe ask a question of somebody who might wink, wink, point you in the right direction.

We can't get litigated against for any of this, right?

None of this is actionable.

Well, I haven't said anything.

That's right.

You've just been saying wink, wink.

Parody.

That's no, that's not.

The game never can't.

Yeah.

I have to, every time I physically blink, I have to say it out loud.

Yeah, and being that it's never happened on the podcast before, my eyes hurt.

All right, hey, uh, we've been playing some other video games, and we're gonna talk about them.

The question for the room is: what are you playing?

What are you

playing?

Hi, as me, the resident evil merchant, and let me ask my friends what they've been playing for video games.

And uh,

Matt,

i'm sorry if i got you sick buddy it's okay we you know i knew i knew hanging out with you after after work was gonna you know come at some cost

oh dude matt you have the laplaga i think that might help

oh

i've had a cold for

21 years

oh that's not fun that's not fun i just i'm just i'm just hoping it's not the one that you need the sort of bioluminescent goggles to see and shoot out of.

That would be worse, I think.

Yeah, it's a little bit cumbersome to treat.

You got to find a physician who's got those bioluminescent goggles and hope they're in your network.

You know, it's a whole thing.

Yeah, not covered by insurance.

No, that's, you know, of course not, right?

That's just the way of the world these days.

That just helps.

That means.

Well, look, I've been sinking quite a few hours into the we play you play.

Hey, I don't want to speak about it too much, but I've been sending

Heather

photos of my Game Boy Advance

like of the screen.

With the screen turned off, just like in weird places.

Yeah.

Almost like a sort of threatening aura.

Yeah, just sort of like, look what I could do.

But I've been playing that quite a bit.

I dipped back into

Claire Obscure Expedition 33, and

I would like to see that one through.

I haven't played that much of it, much more of it since we talked about it last week.

But that is a game that I'm itching to get back to.

And it seems like I'm going to have a pocket of time to do so coming up.

So hopefully

I can get my ducks in a row there.

But I rolled credits on a game that I haven't had a chance to talk about here on the show.

Whoa.

Wow.

What the fuck?

I beat Celeste.

And I think I told you this in person or maybe via text.

I dropped it.

But I beat Celeste.

And look,

that game's fucking hard.

Yeah, it's a challenging game.

That's a really, really, it's a really hard game.

It's a very special game.

Yeah.

It's, it's beautiful.

Heather, I think you'd really like it.

It's, it's, it's, uh, yeah, it's like, it's a masterpiece.

It's just fucking great.

If we, yeah, just just because it's, you know, it's, it's one of my, it's an all-timer for me.

I've mentioned before I have a Celeste poster on the wall in my office.

If I'd won the Switch 2 bet, and obviously I did not, I would have had us all play Celeste.

Wow.

Because I think it's a game.

Matt, I'm glad that you're playing it.

Heather, I think it's like, it's the game, it's even though it's not a combat-focused game, it is a really challenging platforming game.

And the story, I think, you'd really connect with.

Okay.

Traversal is combat.

Yeah, traversal is combat.

It is.

I agree.

Yeah.

Conversation can be combat.

there, there, you know, in the game, within the game, it deals with a lot of like heavy stuff.

And, like, there's like, um,

you know, I'll just, I'll, I'll be candid.

I've had like three panic attacks in my life.

Um, and there's like a couple of, there's like a depiction of a panic attack within the game that is just like, it's astounding.

It's like, I was like, oh, it is kind of exactly fucking like that.

It's like terrible and like bad.

Um,

but, but it's, um, it's really worth,

if you have not played it, I think it's worth checking out.

It's a really, really great game.

I feel like it's always on sale.

You can always find it reliably in a Steam store, in a Steam sale for sure.

And

I loved the characters.

I loved the story.

I loved the music.

The sprite work is really, really stunning

to me.

God, on that OLED Switch, too?

come on now switch also

on the oled switch too not the switch too

the switch also the switch yeah the switch also just really gorgeous looking on there and yeah i i they have these other things you can do there's like uh post credits or post game uh thing that you can like stuff you can do and there's like alternate i think um yeah

i mean there's like the there's like the b sides and the c sides yeah and i did the b sides and the C sides are just like a whole nother level

that I never actually got all the way through.

Um, but

yeah,

there's quite a bit of post-game content you can mess around with.

I, I, yeah, I loved it, um, but that that's it for me.

I'm really glad you played it, Matt, and I'm glad you really connected with it.

Yeah, Maddie, Matty Thorson, the director, Maddie Makes Games, uh, the developer, and

yeah, I'm not sure when their next uh, you know, game of that scope is coming, but I'd be very, very excited to play it.

And, of course, Lena Rain, the composer, Lena Rain,

just that soundtrack is absolutely fantastic.

Yeah,

whatever their next game is, is a day one purchase for me because this was, yeah, like you said, Nick, an all-timer.

Heather, what are you playing?

Well, since our last record, the new expansion of Pokemon, the card game Pocket has come out.

That's 200 more cards, changing up the meta.

And that also means that

the ranked season came to an end.

I finished at Ultra Ball 2

after

sort of

being like,

I don't know what getting the Master Ball is going to get me.

And as I've complained about on the show before, it felt like I was running into the same decks over and over and over again and refused to play those decks.

So

I capped out at Ultra 3.

Since the new season has begun, just like a week ago as of record, I am back at Ultra Ball 2 in ranked.

I just spelled.

Keep talking.

I watched him.

It was okay.

Nick wasn't even, to my knowledge, picking up the glass.

Nick, you were so fucking,

you should be glad I'm not fucking there, dude.

He was, I think, looking at.

That's not bad.

What?

Nick, just stop hovering over the glass.

Well, hold on.

No, I'll look.

I got it.

Just, I don't want...

Matt, I'm not going to be able to hear you if you're thinking.

I got to take the headphones off.

Hold on.

Good.

I don't want you to hear this.

Talk to me.

Look up.

Keep saying it.

He can't get away with this anymore.

This is fucking ridiculous.

I completely fucking agree with you.

Like, also, he wasn't trying to pick up the glass.

He was just touching it.

It was like he was tempting gravity.

Do you think maybe he was defying gravity?

Do you think he's perhaps the witch?

Do you think he's Alphaba?

no because alphaba could do tricks yeah at the very least you know we should look into maybe if they make um a mug or a cup out of uh weeble technology so that it will wobble but it won't spill over they do have those for babies we got to just get him a baby cup we got to get him like a big a wide-bottomed baby cup yeah

Yeah.

Nick is sitting back down.

I have no idea if any of this is going to make it in the bag.

Barely even a spill.

It was fine.

Barely even a a spill.

That was a lot of production for just barely a little spill.

Ranch brought me some paper towels.

It worked out great.

This is an absolutely true story.

One time I was in Japan and I had my cell phone with me, but I was

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That's a true story.

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I eventually got off that roof when the sun rose.

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So I'm I'm back at Ultra Ball 2 in ranked in this new season already.

And

to my pleasure and joy, there is no single absolutely dominant deck.

Because if any of those decks begin being played, then there are counters to those decks now.

So there has to be a constant rotation in your...

in your decks.

I got almost all the way up to Ultra 3 and then lost, I think, 20 games in a row and knocked myself back down to Ultra 1 and had to work my way back up.

Wow.

It was

wild.

But that's what I've been playing.

Pokemon the card game pocket.

Nick, what have you been playing?

Heather, thank you so much for asking.

I've been playing Claire Obscure Expedition 33, but instead of talking about that this week, I thought...

Since we're talking about something retro, I would talk about a new book that I got, The Art of the Box.

This is published by Bitmap Books.

I'll read the copy here.

The Art of the Box features 26 biographies of artists who, at some point in their careers, found themselves illustrating video game packaging.

With information drawn from live interviews, whenever possible, we discuss their beginnings as an artist, their inspiration and influences, the games they illustrated, and where their artistic careers have taken them.

We'll talk through this because obviously this is an audio medium.

And Matt, I wish you were in the studio to

mess around with this because this is a thick boy.

Oh, look what daddy did.

Yeah, look what daddy did, indeed.

This is like a textbook.

This is like an encyclopedia volume of box art starting back in the, you know, in the 80s and, you know,

going into

not all the way into the present, but covering a good swath of gaming.

This is just like a really handsome volume.

I mean, it's very thick, but then also it's just got so many examples of just like full color box art right there.

Wow.

We've got bad dudes.

Wow.

Which is just,

yeah,

it's just really cool art.

And part of the fun of these games is like a lot of times they were just sort of like Gunship 2000.

It's just like also just like a really, really cool bit of art

from a

1994 game.

And it's basically just like a reference to Apocalypse.

Now, a lot of these, you know, has captions that provide context.

But there's also just like a lot of times these developers,

these artists rather, had either a fair amount of leeway

or just didn't really even know what they were drawing.

And so they just kind of took a gander like it like a guess and just sort of sometimes made a really wild decision.

So for instance, like this, you know, this, the, the, the box art for Othello, you know, it has for some reason like this weird guy at the center of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I don't know why this guy is like the Othello guy, but they just sort of made that discreative decision.

It's a

it's a cool bit of art.

Like it is a really gorgeous painting.

But also the book itself is gorgeous.

It is like a coffee table book that your dad would have had when you were a kid.

And you'd be like,

what are all these paintings?

What does this mean?

Look at this Legend of the Mystical Ninja one.

Jesus Christ.

That's a nightmare.

I love it.

That is a nightmare.

Whoa.

Are these multiple volumes or is this only like...

Does this cover like 1980 to 1995?

Because it doesn't seem like a large enough book to cover

like in the modern era.

Well, the way it's organized is it's based around artists.

So it's basically like a large catalog of an individual artist's work for, and sometimes that encompasses, you know, one decade.

There are things that came out as late as like, you know, the 2010s that are in this book.

So there is some more contemporary stuff.

It just depends on the particular artist.

Here we've got, we were talking about

Kojima earlier.

Bayou Billy.

Yeah, we got Snake's Revenge.

Wow.

Right next to Bayou Billy.

Bayou Billy was one of my, like, it's just one of my favorite weird games to exist because it's like, why the fuck would they make a game where you were like a like a Louisiana shit kicker?

Like what like little boy dreamed of playing that like game on their Nintendo, but that for some reason that was a Konami game that was made and the yard is really cool.

It's just like this Bayou man with a big knife and a gator.

I bet it was a crocodile Dundee license that they couldn't get.

That makes sense, yeah.

This was also, for me, a cousin game.

This was a game that a cousin had

that, like, you know, years after it came out that I was like, ah, this is, this is strange.

Snake's Revenge, which is the kind of weird semi-sequel to

Metal Gear, not Metal Gear Solid, but the original Metal Gear.

And, you know, the box heart here that is just very like, it looks like an 80s movie poster.

So anyway, it's a a really gorgeous volume.

Oh, Golden Axe.

There you go.

That's one for you, Heather.

Look at that.

That's great, right?

That's great.

That's right.

But anyway, this brings us to one by

artist, rather, Roger Matskas,

which is the box art or one of the box arts for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions of Doom, the 1995 Doom.

And look at that.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Look at that.

Yeah, we got Doom Guy, helmet off, just shotgun blasting the shit out of an imp.

And I don't know.

This is just like the kind of shit you'd see painted on a van.

You know what I mean?

It's like,

I don't know.

I love this sort of art.

And I do miss box art.

That is one thing I will say, like,

with the

erosion of physical media.

Just having a really cool looking box.

Yeah, I really do miss that.

A pamphlet, too.

And especially when it was a little bit more interpretive.

Oh shit, that was Eternal Champions.

Yes, there was an Eternal Champions

part right there.

Yeah, that's really cool too.

This is also just fucking great.

That's great art.

God, this is such bad audio, but we're having a great time looking at this thing.

It's a, Eternal Champions was a Sega, it was, was it Sega CD exclusive or the additional Sega CD?

It starts as a Genesis game and then gets a Sega CD expansion.

Yeah, which had a lot more extended animations.

Which we covered here on the podcast.

That's right, we sure did.

But like, you know, that was like a fighting game in the era of Mortal Kombat.

So 1993, actually, the same year as Doom.

And the idea was just all the violence was just extremely over the top.

But yeah, anyway, Rad book.

And I like having big chunky books like this.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just a, it's just a

fucking blast to look at.

And all the information on all the artists, all the context on how these designs came to be is really awesome.

Hey, there you go.

That's one for you, Heather.

Another one for you.

The Outer Worlds.

Hey, it's The Outer Worlds.

Yeah.

Which I became deeply familiar with while doing the research for my episode of Secret Level on Amazon Prime.

Fuck, I just want to keep looking at this book.

We got a podcast.

It's a hypnotic book.

It's really cool.

It's really great.

Here, take a look.

It's too heavy for me to hold.

I don't don't appreciate that on the cover of the book is a rating for the book like it's a video game.

Nine out of ten, a must-have for any self-respecting retro gamer, says Nintendo Life.

I don't want a book to have a nine out of a ten.

I kind of like it because it's got that sticker, and then it's also got the MS-DOS-like sticker in the bottom left.

It's like, I don't know, it's kind of meant to evoke an old school box office or a box art itself.

Oh, yeah, the R-type one there.

Fuck.

Yeah, really cool.

This is a fantastic book, And

I might get myself a copy.

This is not an ad.

I might get myself a copy of this fucking awesome book.

It's great.

It's a great book.

Matt, you got a favorite box art that comes to mind?

Gosh.

I mean,

not really.

Like, I feel like

a lot of the games that I'm super fond of didn't really have that sort of like unique

like box art aesthetic.

I remember the box art of like Kingdom Hearts 2 having like this sort of like like holographic.

That was kind of, that was kind of cool.

But other than that,

not really.

It was more of a byproduct of before, you know, you could just take a 3D model from the game itself or an environment for the game itself, and it would just kind of work as a piece of art, as a still,

you'd be a little bit more interpretive.

You'd be having like, hey, I've got some...

whatever.

I've got some 8-bit pixel, you know, art.

I've got some sprite that I've got to like figure out how to render render as a as a full color painting.

You know, the, because like, I feel like a lot of the games that I, that I love were like, here's the thing from the game, yeah, like on the box for sure, right?

Like, you know, it's like Charizard or Pikachu on the box.

And it's like, okay, well, I know what that is.

But even that, though, you're not seeing like just a sprite of Charizard or Pikachu.

Like, you're seeing a drawing and still.

You're seeing, yeah.

And that art style is very special to me, actually, like from that era.

Not to go back too far into a topic we were discussing earlier, but I kind of do think that the box art for Grand Theft Auto 3 is pretty good.

Like it's very iconic.

Sure.

You know, like it's like that.

It really, it really pops.

No, 100%.

I've never wanted to just cancel a podcast and read a book.

This book, like I wish, I wish this was a video podcast so that we could just flip through it and show the drawings.

It's hypnotic.

I feel like I have lost the ability to speak.

So, this drawing, this I also like, because, you know, just speaking of things that we'd be painted on a van, we've got this

bikini cavewoman and a dinosaur and then a dude with a fucking gun with a rifle.

But this was a, they made some games, the Worlds of Ultima, that were kind of spin-offs of the Ultima franchise in the 90s.

And this was Worlds of Ultima, the Savage Empire.

And so they just take, you know, the Ultima was like a, like, was like a kind of a swords and sorcery,

you know, high fantasy franchise, but they had a couple, they had this one, and then they had one that was set on Mars, but they were kind of based on like H.G.

Wells sort of

sci-fi sort of sort of universes.

And I don't know, this is.

It's kind of cool that they were experimenting in those directions.

And I think this art reflects that.

A lot of these box covers, for those of you who are, you know, young and perhaps don't remember any of these 90s or 80s games,

they look, they all of them look like the art for stranger things.

Like every single one of them has like that, that

hyper-realistic painting of a human face in front of like floating pyramids and boulders and like a dragon.

This artist, Dennis Lubet or Dennis Lubet, did a lot of the Ultima franchise and one that is a full page here, which is really great.

And this is a game I had.

And this was another game that, like Doom, was hugely influential in terms of establishing first person

as a gameplay perspective, Ultima Underworld.

And the art for that, you know, kind of classic Dungeons and Dragons monster manual sort of stuff, but it's, it's a really cool bit of

dark fantasy art with a with a warrior stalking down into a catacomb and some sort of,

oh, we're looking over the shoulder of some sort of goblin that is lurking in the depths below.

So much of this art would have been dismissed by

parents.

And

like, certainly, any art critic would not look at video game boxes and be like, wow, this is an elevated piece of art.

But when you see it placed in a book like that, you really gain a full respect for

how much work goes into one of these box art covers that often kids would open the box and throw the box away.

Like it was, it wasn't until,

you know, PlayStation, Saturn, Sega CD that games started coming in boxes that you would physically want to keep.

Yeah, and but it also functioned, you're absolutely right.

And it also functioned, the boxes themselves functioned as a bit of point-of-sale marketing.

Right.

Because, you know, you weren't advertising video games on television.

Obviously, you weren't showing like the internet did not exist in the way that it does now.

So a lot of times, people would go to a store and be like, oh, look at that game and pick it up and look at it and decide to buy it on impulse.

I mean, it's just, it's,

it was a completely different time for the industry.

But

anyway, Art of the Box is the book, Bitmap, Bitmap Books.

Oh, fuck.

Never mind.

Won't bother trying to say it.

Never mind.

Bitmap Books.

Bitmap Books.

Bitmap Books.

Bitmap Books.

Any noise annoys an oyster, but a noisy noise annoys an oyster most.

Shiraco Dunlap.

Let's talk about Doom.

Doom the Dark Ages is out this week.

We're going back in time to 1993's Doom for Retrograde.

This is the game that started the franchise, that started first-person shooters, although there were other FPS games that

predated this, including id's own Wolfenstein 3D, but this is really the one that made it a thing.

And it's, as such, one of the most consequential and influential games of all time.

I'm curious here, like, let's just start here.

What is everyone's background with Doom?

Like, like, when did you get introduced to Doom?

What was your first time playing a game in the Doom franchise?

Doom came with a computer that my parents bought me.

Wow.

And I don't know if they...

I mean, certainly they saw me playing it because the computer didn't live in my room.

The computer was a family computer.

Everybody used the computer.

My mom used it for balancing checkbooks and doing spreadsheets.

I used it to play video games or write papers for school.

But Doom came with the computer, and I had to learn,

you know, what I didn't know how to enter.

Like, DOS was not like something I knew before Doom.

Right.

And then it was like, oh, this is how I access this drive.

This is what I do in order to launch the game.

Like, DOS is not a visual interface.

It's a text.

It's a

line of text that you type in to begin games, which I don't think is something that

makes a lot of like sense to a lot of gamers today.

The idea that you would turn on your PlayStation 5 and there would just be a blinking cursor at the top and then you would have to type something in order to start a game.

Yeah.

But that's how you started Doom.

Maybe if you're a you know a contemporary PC gamer, you know, you've messed around with your BIOS at a certain point, that that's maybe the closest,

you know, to kind of what it was like to work in

a pre-GUI operating system.

But yeah,

MS-DOS was what the platform that Doom was originally released on.

MS stands for Microsoft DOS Disk Operating System, and it was the command line operating system that was the predecessor to Windows, and it's what I played most PC games on.

It was what we had on our home computer.

Even when Windows 95 came out, and there were other Windows before that, but Windows 95 was the first one where it's just like, yeah, you can just kind of use this as your primary OS on PC.

Obviously, they had graphical user interfaces on Mac for a while by that point, but it was years before high-end games actually supported Windows, so you still were just playing them in DOS.

And yeah, you'd have to get in there and you have to type some shit.

And sometimes you'd have to make a boot disk so that your computer would boot

using certain parameters so that you could play a specific game

because of the quirks of

your individual hardware setup and how the individual software interfaced with it.

It was a whole fucking ordeal.

It was a big pain in the ass, but it was a thing you just kind of got used to.

So today,

in preparation for this episode, I downloaded the original Doom on PlayStation 5 just so I could like re-familiarize myself with it one more time, even though I've played infinity hours of Doom.

And the coolest part of it was, oh, this is what Doom looks like running on a high-end computer that we couldn't afford.

Because at the time, Doom was like choppy.

It had a low frame rate for us.

You know,

the only way you could play it is with your keyboard at the time.

So it was like a, it was kind of like a,

like you're looking through a window at a game that could happen in the future for me, but it wasn't a game that actively in the present, I could run at like blisteringly fast speeds.

Also, we didn't have a sound card.

So like the sound would come out of the

PC speaker.

speaker just getting bleeps and bloops yeah bleeps and bloops i mean you'd still get like a

well whenever you'd shoot somebody but it wasn't the higher end sample that's on the playstation 5 game i was like god damn this game looks good i remember when we got a sound blaster

in my because you know the the step the move from going from a the pc internal speaker which is just It's impossible to describe how crude it is if someone hasn't heard it, but it's like a one-channel, you know, basically tone only that's used for both

music and sound effects.

And it just sounds like nothing, basically.

It's like, you know, it's like trying to use, I don't even know how to put this in young person terms because I don't even know what, what do you, what do you, like, I was going to say, it's like just trying to make sounds from the numpad on your phone.

But I was like, that doesn't even track if you haven't ever used a phone like that.

I don't fucking know what to say.

I don't know.

It's bleeps and bloops.

What do you want from me?

Well, if you, like, if you have to dial in on your phone, instead of like pressing one of your contacts it sounds like that it would be like boop boop boop because there's still dial tones when you're entering like dials like like phone numbers yeah right so yeah that's what it was

but but when we got a sound blaster we like you add like uh you know

an expansion card um that went into uh boy it was it was before pci slots i don't remember what the slots were before that the expansion slots that we're using but it went into one of those and it's just such a huge upgrade going from bleeps and bloops to like hearing like full speech like you know it and uh it it was just like

uh cd quality audio practically or comparatively it was it was it's such an in was such an incrazy leap and that's what i had when we were playing doom for the first time so i i was hearing the famous uh doom music and sound effects uh as it was supposed to be presented matt what was your first experience with the doom franchise i mean my very very first experience with the doom franchise was the fucking bad movie that we watched for the podcast.

The

Carl Urban Dwayne Johnson-led

2005.

2005 movie Doom, yes.

Real bad.

Bad movie.

Very, very bad.

And then since then,

I've messed with both Doom 2016 and Eternal.

And

very excited, actually, about the Dark Ages.

It looks really cool to me.

And then the first time I ever played Doom 1 was when Heather brought in the 32X.

That's wild that the 32X version of Doom is the one that you've played.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Truly very insane.

And yeah, but I like.

You might, Matt.

You might be the only

person

in the last,

I would bet the last decade

for whom Doom was introduced to them on a 32X.

It's on planet.

It's entirely possible.

I should be given some sort of a trophy or something

for accomplishing such a feat.

But

I like sort of just like what I know about Doom.

I like the Doom guy.

I feel like the development is very storied, right?

Like, and

I do think it's just like, you know, it's obviously

an iconic franchise for a reason.

It has stood the test of time and people are still excited about Doom, which I think is very cool.

You know, my very, very first exposure to any of these

original 3D games like Wolfenstein 3D was at my school.

In the basement was

the guy who would be the

track and field medic.

I don't know what you would call him.

Like the guy who was like the,

if you fell down in PE and you broke your leg, he'd be the one who'd come up and attend to you first, right?

He had a windowless office.

Nick's thrilling out a job application right now.

Okay.

And he, he had to be a windowless office.

He, uh,

he had, uh, and he had, yeah, no windows in the basement of our school.

Yeah.

And he had brought in his own extremely high-end PC.

And he was playing Wolfenstein.

And I, um, I did a lot of like, you know, sports when I was a little kid.

So I would go down there and have to get like my legs wrapped for shin splints.

And I would show up and he'd be playing Wolfenstein.

And it was like, oh my God,

that game is 3D.

And he would let me watch him kill Nazis for like a half hour before I went to track practice.

And it was so, I, I, I wish you could understand how the first time you see something moving in three dimensions, but it is a video game, how staggering that was.

Yeah.

And then when I saw Doom, I was like, oh, this is like that game that guy plays, the Wolfenstein game.

I was going to say, like, certainly like a novelty of

an era.

Like, we don't, you cannot experience that anymore because now you just like, now everybody knows what video games look like.

No one's ever going to be shocked really by what a video game looks like, I think, anymore.

I feel like the closest is the first time you put on a VR headset.

Right.

Yeah.

And you're like, oh shit, I can like look around and the game is everywhere.

And that, that is similar-ish to the first time you see a video game that is three dimensions instead of two.

I agree.

That's the closest experience I've had in adulthood to what it was like to experience something like and I remember more vividly like you my first experience with Wolfenstein 3D than I do my first experience with Doom

But

Wolfenstein 3D, we should say that neither of these games are actually 3D, if you want to be pedantic about it.

They're two and a half D games.

All sorts of trickery is going on to

simulate 3D.

We didn't have a proper 3D engine from id until Quake, which comes later.

The thing about Wolfenstein 3D versus Doom is it was all corridors and everything was all on a flat plane.

So when Doom comes out and you've got ramps, you've got changes in elevation, even though you can't aim vertically, it feels like things are a lot more open and also like just the environments are a lot more diverse versus just again, just

room, hallway, room, hallway was basically all you were dealing with in Wolfenstein 3D.

But it's the main thing beyond these games being 3D was that they were smooth scrolling.

Because, you know, I'd played a lot of

PC RPGs, and even PC RPGs that were like 10 years older than Doom had first-person dungeon exploration, but it was like step-by-step.

It was grid-based.

Phantasy Star on

Master System and Genesis had a similar sort of thing when you got into the dungeons, correct?

Yes.

Yeah, and the Wizardry games,

Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, all these franchises had that similar sort of thing.

Ultima actually is one of the,

through via Ultima Wonderworld, is a game that had smooth scrolling, first-person perspective, gameplay, but Doom is the one where it was like really like became this mainstream thing.

And it really is like kind of amazing how silky it felt compared to everything else of the era.

Yeah, I mean, I had seen a three-dimensional first-person game previous, but it was like you were looking at somebody shuffling through postcards.

It was like somebody had walked through a hallway and taken a picture with each step.

And then they stood in front of you and

you would just cycle through that deck.

So it didn't feel like movement, but Doom felt like movement.

And so did Wolfenstein.

Yeah, it was a flipbook versus a movie.

Yeah.

Anyway, so I like

the other thing I guess we should talk about in terms of Doom and what software was like in this era is not that the internet didn't exist, but it didn't exist in the way that we know it today.

It didn't have like this easy, widespread distribution model.

There certainly weren't any digital storefronts.

It wasn't that sort of the environment.

You might find a

Doom on like a BBS or something or a newsgroup, but a lot of times if you like you were basically

what a BBS and a newsgroup is for people who don't know.

Yeah, like how to describe this.

BBS stood for bulletin board service.

And so it was basically like you would dial into a specific network to interface with just the people using that network.

So it was like kind of a closed sort of system as opposed to, you know, the internet at large, which is kind of like this more open environment so you're kind of clustered into these smaller sort of buckets I think of interaction I think a similar way of looking at it would be if your television could only look at like if you subscribed to Macs And the only thing you could look at on your television was you open up your television and you could only dial into Macs.

And that was the available content that you had.

And that was the only, like you could never watch anything else.

That's kind of like what a BBS was, except it was like a because I had a

Prodigy, I think was what it was called when I was really young.

Yeah, well, Prodigy was kind of like an early ISP.

That was much more of a closed sort of network environment, but that was also something through a corporation.

BBSs and news groups were oftentimes just like niche enthusiasts, you know, like who are organizing themselves and

were grouping themselves that way.

Anyway,

something might be, you might find this, a shareware version of Doom there, but also you might find just like a floppy disk or buy it at retail.

Shareware, by the way, is that, again, this is so old that I feel like we got to catch people up.

Of course, no.

Shareware was, there were two types of distribution systems for video games back in the 90s.

There was the games that you purchased and then the games that you could get for free.

And Doom was shareware.

It was a free game.

Yeah, I had a bullet point in here.

Do younger gamers understand the concept of shareware?

Question mark.

And it was basically an an early internet slash pre-internet way of

independently publishing software.

And it's the same phenomenon as same thing as like you'd get a demo and then you could buy the full version.

Most of the, like in my memory, mostly these were games that were shareware, but there were like indie word processors, indie accounting apps, you know, niche apps, like, I don't know, like audio editing or whatever the fuck.

And I used to go, when I was a kid, I used to go with my dad and my brother to computer shows.

And a lot of the show floor would be dedicated to shareware, which would just be like, hey, here's here's some discs for applications and games, and you can get the shareware game, or you can also buy the full version.

My introduction to Doom was getting it on a floppy disk, installing it on our home computer, and then eventually getting the free version, or I'm sorry, the full version rather,

and playing the full game.

And I had played shareware versions also, I should say, of id's previous, two of id's previous games, which was Commander Keen, one of them was a, which was a 2D platformer, and then the aforementioned Wolfenstein 3D.

But all this comes out as

via id Software, which is the developer that is founded in 1991 in the suburb of Dallas by John Carmack, Adrian Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero.

They all end up working on Doom.

One of the strangest things about id to me is that John Carmack and Adrian Carmack are not related.

How specific is

the last name Carmack to both work in video games, to work at the same company, to co-found a studio and no relation.

I think one of the strangest things about id Software is that it gave birth to one of the,

to my knowledge, to my experience as a, as a conscious human, celebrity game designers in John Romero.

Like when Romero left id, it was like a thing that happened that I knew about.

And why would a kid know that a developer had left, like that a programmer had left a developer or that a studio had like broken up and that somebody had gone somewhere else.

And then he ended up making a different game that had like all of this hype.

Wasn't it called Daikatana?

Oh, Daikatana.

Yeah, that's it.

There was a game called Gun, though.

Right.

But yeah, no, Daikatana was the Ionstorm John Romero game that was much promised and under-delivered.

But yeah,

no, 100%.

I mean, John Carmack and Romero both were kind of celebrities, but John Romero, I think, maybe partly because of

ability to self-promote, but also because

he just kind of had like a rock star look to him, you know, but ended up becoming something of a

game developer celebrity in the era when there weren't a lot of those.

Like you would only know Sid Meyer because he was on the

name of the box on Civilization or Roberta Williams because she was on King's Quest.

Like John, John Romero's name wasn't on your copy of Doom.

Like he was in the credits, but like suddenly he was in magazines.

And that was so strange like I didn't know the names of the people that made Street Fighter and Street Fighter was a far more important game to me.

I guess boon tobias were kind of like, you know, though they were kind of forefronted a little bit with Mortal Kombat.

Yeah.

But, you know, yeah, it was,

yeah, we were 100%

absolutely astute observation.

John Carmack also, you know, considered by a lot of

games enthusiasts the, you know, the most talented games programmer of all time, one of the most influential programmers of all time.

This thing for me, like, especially looking back on it, is like, it was, in a way, more of a technology company than a development studio, or as much a technology company as a games company, you know?

Because you kind of like look at their output, like, yeah, Doom is an unimpeachable game, incredible video game.

But the, the technology is really what's what's driving that.

And some of their later output is.

You know, some of the other Doom games are kind of more of the same.

And then you get to something like Doom 3.

And what's really impressive about Doom 3 is the engine, as opposed to like the game design, which felt maybe a little bit dated by the time that game came out.

Here's a John Carmack quote that I like:

Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie.

It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.

I now do I do, I don't agree with that, but I do think it's interesting that that's kind of his driving philosophy, and that explains a lot of why a game like Doom just does not have a story.

Well, it should be present in both mediums.

I agree.

When I sat down and played Doom today, I was a bit like,

I felt an emotion that I can't identify, which was, I think,

gratitude because I started the game and then I was playing the game and I had a gun immediately and I was shooting things.

Yes.

And so much of the on-ramp of gaming now is like, there's like...

10 minutes before you can fucking play a game and your main mode of interacting with the game is slowly dripped out to you.

It's not like, oh, I could use this gun for the rest of the game and I start with it.

Like now it's like, okay,

look, you're going to unlock abilities in Assassin's Creed and eventually you'll be able to jump off of a thing and stab somebody in the head.

But until then, you have to sneak around.

And I get that that, that percolation of gameplay is part of a successful dopamine loop, but playing Doom and just starting and immediately shooting things, I was like, oh, thank, this feels good.

Oh, no, I agree with you there.

I mean, like,

too many games now are clogged with too many mechanics, unnecessary skill trees, and then just,

like you were saying, the onboarding taking so, so fucking long to actually get into things.

And I feel like an asshole if I skip all that stuff.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, but I also do, I mean, like, there are also just like different approaches to game design.

Like, there are like story-rich games.

I mean, we were just talking about Celeste earlier, which I think that game is does not, as great as the gameplay is, that game does not work on the same level if you remove its story.

So, but I more just brought that up not to

agree or disagree with it, but to more just say, like, that was kind of the governing philosophy of the studio.

It was just like gameplay-focused, and it was in an era where I feel like a lot of PC games were just like,

hey, we're going to make a deep, lore-rich RPG, or we're going to make a really expansive strategy game where you can really get in the weeds.

They were almost just making like pure arcadey gameplay.

Yeah.

Doom kind of almost just feels like an arcade game.

Yeah.

Right.

You just, you just, you, you just hop in there and you start blasting.

Yeah.

It also, um, because it was

uh violent and so iconic, it also became like the focal point of a lot of like congressional hearings, especially in the wake of Columbine, uh, because the Columbine shooters were, uh,

I can't remember if this has been, uh, you know,

this has been rescinded since, uh, that they, that they weren't actually gamers, but that that was the legend that happened in the news media at the time of the, of the Columbine shooting.

And the truth is, they weren't huge gamers, but they were so ex like so married to, in the media, to doom and to quake.

And that was what, quote, trained them to be killers.

And so there was all of this pushback all of the sudden in like like 1998, 1999

against Doom specifically.

It's kind of crazy that because, you know, Doom comes out in 1993, the Columbine high school tragedy happens in 1999.

So there's a, there's a huge amount of time between the two things.

But yes, it was connected to Doom

largely because of Eric Harris, who was the

ringleader there,

who kind of like ended up, I read a whole book on Columbine.

We don't need to dig deep on this.

You read a book on Columbine?

Yeah, I read a book on Columbine, yeah.

It was great.

It was really, really, it's like a super fascinating, well-researched thing that kind of just like did knock down a lot of the myths that came out in the aftermath, the immediate aftermath, and persisted because that's just like what got circulated in the media.

But the Doom thing was real.

He, like, Eric Harris was an ad, was an avid, you know, doom player and doom modder to some degree, I believe.

The thing that was not true is that there wasn't a thing where he like had a custom Doom level where that was like the high school or that he'd been like rehearsing the

attacks in.

Anyway, but yes, there was like a moral panic in the aftermath of Columbine regarding not just Doom, but first-person shooters at large, so-called murder simulators,

you know, just one of the one of the things they found to

go after.

Just because they were searching for anything.

Yeah, I mean, but it's also...

anything but guns.

We got to do something about this game where you can kill aliens and demons.

Anyway, that was a grim tangent.

Nick, so, so were you

when this game comes out,

I became like fixated on it.

I played it all the time.

I downloaded other, or not downloaded, bought sharewared other games

that were Doom-esque.

Yeah, Doom clones, they called them of the era.

Nowadays they call them Doom-likes, but now back then it was Doom Kleins.

Doom clones, and it was kind of derisive at times.

Yeah, like I played A Million Hours of Rise of the Triad, which is a Doom, except the enemies beg for their lives before you kill them.

No, please don't.

Would get down on their hands and knees and like wave at you.

Jesus.

And then you could execute them.

But the thing is, this is the thing.

The game didn't reward you for showing mercy, because if you didn't execute them, they would stand up and get take their gun out again.

Yeah, it's like what value system are you conveying with your gameplay?

Killer beat, killer, baby.

Yeah, don't try.

Yeah, kill.

I guess so.

Yeah,

after this game comes out, though, I'm looking for the next Doom experience.

And so I'm playing a lot of these first-person games, but you, Nick, have always struck me as somebody who likes a more methodical, lore-heavy, introspective, patient game.

Did Doom change your trajectory at any point and like get you into that arcade-y Twitch feeling?

Or was this like a one-off for you that you were then like, huh, all right, well, I'm going back to my other stuff?

No, I look, I've always liked action games.

I like platformers more than shooters or combat-focused games, but I do like games with combat in them.

And Doom's design was so novel and so good that I got heavily into Doom, played the shit out of Doom.

And

also Doom 2, and then later Final Doom, which was, you know,

kind of a pseudo-sequel slash complete edition of the whole experience.

After Quake comes out, there is a fantasy first-person shooter called Hexen.

Did you ever play that?

Yeah, I forget the chronology of it.

That might have predated Quake, but yes, I did play Heretic and then Hexen, and those were both the Raven software games that were fantasy, like high fantasy.

The thing is, like, I didn't like those games as much as I wanted to because I wanted them to be more like paced-like RPGs, but they felt like shooters where you just had a wand instead of a gun.

There was Blood, which was like a super horror-themed one, and there was Shadow Warrior, which was which I had never played either of these games, but I know one that was kind of like more of a

martial arts sort of themed thing that had like

some weird one-liners.

And I think the protagonist was called Low Wang.

So it was just kind of like this weirdly offensive sort of thing.

Also, Redneck Rampage was another one, which was like...

It was just like you just, I forget if you were a hick going around shooting guys or if you were shooting other hicks or maybe both but it was just like they were that they were just sort of like all these derivative sort of games that tried to

it's the same thing that we were saying with rise of the triad where it was like that that was just like hey doom but it's like more violent and more disturbing and it's just like well what works about the doom well doom is it is an extraordinarily violent and bloody game um it's really grisly but it's fun and it's and it and it feels new and so all these derivative games just tried to heighten the violence and the gore factor uh and it it just like it kind of missed they kind of missed the mark that makes a lot of sense to me because like having messed around with more of the um the newer entries um they they're very fast they play they probably play

like you're talking about like doom 2016 and doom eternal yes yeah they play they play very fast and like

Like even though it is like, yeah, like you were saying, like, obviously, like, very violent, very bloody, gory stuff.

It's almost like, it's almost so fun, it's kind of funny, kind of, where you're like, just kind of like blasting through things, and you're like, this is just ridiculous.

This is crazy.

Like, it's so over the top that, like,

I think the same thing too about like fatalities, too.

They're so over the top.

I was like at a friend's, my friend Connor's house not long ago, having like a video game

fighting tournament thing, and we were playing the newer Mortal Kombat.

And they were the fatalities in Mortal Kombat 1 are so nasty and so over the top

that we were like in tears laughing.

They're so funny how ridiculous they are.

Because it's just like you can't comprehend that level of, it's insane.

It's just, it's so ridiculous.

It's not even real.

But that's partly what they're going for at this point, right?

I feel like that's partly what they were going for in the original Mortal Kombat.

Yeah.

Like Homelander, like punching T-1000's titanium skull out of its head.

It's great.

It's really, really fun.

But like with this, with the, yeah, with Doom Eternal in particular, like there's like a setting where you can like, because like it's pretty fast.

And you can turn it.

You could, Heather would hate this

modification.

You could turn down the speed in that game just a little bit if you want, like if you want to feel like you have some semblance of control of what's going on.

Because it's just like, it's just, it's just crazy stuff.

Something I like about

the trajectory of the first game, of the original, rather, is that like,

I just think it's kind of funny that you start in space and then end in hell.

That's pretty, because those are two opposite places to be.

It's really good.

Yeah.

That's really funny to me.

Yeah, it is funny.

It's also funny that Doom has such a long shadow that he is a

downloadable, or he was a battle pass skin in Fortnite.

Right.

Yeah.

That you could be.

Doomguy.

Right.

And

of all the references that those kids don't get, Doomguy has to be high on that list.

I wonder, or is Doomguy just sort of known?

Has Doomguy stuck around enough in the Zeitgeist partly because of the name Doomguy?

I have no idea.

Back to the original game.

I mean, the music is really good.

And the sound design, all by Bobby Prince, and a Vietnam veteran and former lawyer who did a bunch of sounds and music for

games.

But, you know, what I think of is like, yeah, there's sort of this the metal soundtrack, which is really good.

But then also just things like the imp howls and the shotgun sounds are like so.

Yeah, it's so visceral.

And

that's a big part of the Doom aesthetic is just how

violent and nasty it sounds and scary at times.

I mean, that's the other thing that's hard to convey, but it was like these, it was like kind of a scary experience to play.

It sounds like it hurts to not just get shot as an imp, but it hurts to be one.

Like, like the existence of being an imp is pain.

If you're playing Doom now, I think that you can't aim vertically does make it feel odd.

That's the weirdest thing.

Predated

mouse look as a convention, which is basically the same thing you're doing if you're using dual analog sticks and a controller.

You also can't jump, which is strange.

So that starts to come around as far as id games go in Quake, which comes out in 96.

And there were some other games that had versions of it, but it was like

its absence in Doom is a thing that that makes it feel like a, you know, less like a modern game.

Well, there was, there was a point where

Matt's playing it on the 32X and you come across your first enemy that is up on a platform above your head.

And I think you said, how do I aim at him?

And I was like, I think you just shoot.

And

yeah, your gun is pointed like at the wall, but the bullets are hitting way up in the air.

Yeah, it's basically like a, like a, you know, Z-axis auto aim where it will just, it will just shoot something on a higher plane.

It's like you're in the movie Wanted, where you can curve

it in whatever direction you want.

You're right, it is very much like the movie Wanted with the curved bullets.

Everybody knows what the movie is, everybody knows that.

That's, I think, immediately what I was thinking.

Was there a Wanted video game where you could curve bullets?

It should have been a game.

You remember 2008's Wanted

starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy?

James McAvoy and

Morgan Freeman's in there as well.

Morgan Freeman and

I think Chris Pratt is a small part, not one of the main guys in there, but he's like his office friend.

Look, I remember the movie is cool.

There is a video game.

It's called Wanted Weapons of Fate, which I think also misses, like, because the movie is based off of a comic book, and it's not anything like the movie is very different than the comic book, of course.

And so then I think the game is just then further in that direction.

It doesn't look like it's great.

Is the game, does it look like the game's adapted from the movie or is the game also adapted from the comic book?

Can you tell?

It looks like it's more adapted from the movie.

Got it.

Yeah.

I was thinking about the other games that would fall under Doom clones.

One of them is Marathon, which was Bungie's, I think their first FPS game.

That was a Mac exclusive.

So I never played on my own computer, but my friend's dad had a Mac, so I did play it on his computer.

And

it owes some to Doom.

It also owns some to Ultima Underworld.

It's got elements that are a little bit more adventure gamey, not just pure FPS, but it is, you know, Bungie developed and is the game that ultimately leads to the Halo franchise, even though it was kind of like a, because it was on a more niche platform, it was not as widely played.

System Shock, another one, basically like the game that leads to the

existence of the immersive sim genre.

Duke Nukem 3D, of course, which we've talked about on the podcast.

And

it's funny.

Duke Nukem 3D comes out around the same time as Quake, and Duke Nukem was so much, so comparatively crude technologically, because Quake had a fully 3D engine, but Duke Nukem was just like...

had a lot more charm and character to it.

So I feel like it ended up having a little bit more, you know, impact on the zeitgeist at the time.

Obviously, like Quake has had a longer tail.

Quake was like, oh, I'm in a dark tunnel fighting a thing that kind of looks maybe

like two triangles and legs.

Whereas Duke Nukem, it was like they had taken a photograph of a woman from 10,000 feet away.

blown it up so that she was dancing in front of you in like a fake strip club.

Yeah.

And you could only tell tell that she was a woman because it was like, if I walked 10,000 feet away, I would think it was a woman on my screen.

But, like,

the comparison between the two is I knew the environments I was in in Duke Nukem 3D.

I was like, oh, this is a club.

Yeah, I'm in a strip club.

There's a, there's a pig who's also a cop, there's like a pig mutant cop.

And that makes me laugh because I'm 13 years old.

And then I can offer money to the stripper and say, shake it, baby.

And then I I can blow her away.

And that's all you want is a teenager.

Yeah.

Whereas Quake, you're like, I am in a nightmare.

Yeah.

It's very Lovecrafty.

Yeah, and I don't recognize any of the locations I'm in.

I can't tell.

Like, if there was no gravity, I wouldn't even be able to tell what was up and down.

The other thing that Duke Nukem did was it heightened, like...

You know, you could like blow up a building in Duke Nukem 3D, so that felt like something new.

And then there were things like, you know, you had a gun you could use to freeze somebody.

Like the weapons were a little bit more cartoony.

You had like a shrinking gun.

And so it kind of heightened things in that way.

And so that's partly why it felt fresh, even though, you know, the humor is just lines stolen from

other IP.

And then Unreal comes out in 1998, which is, you know, most notable for debuting the first version of the Unreal Engine, which is still with us.

Super consequential game for that reason.

And one of the most famous video game covers in a video game magazine, which is, I believe it was

Next Generation magazine that had a picture of the Unreal, the original Unreal Monster.

And it was like, yes, this is a video game.

Right.

Yes.

And you look at it now and you're like, what else could it be?

But at the time, people were like, oh my God, you can see that it has a face.

Heather, do you ever mess around with the cheat codes in the original Doom?

Because I like it with, like, especially comparing it to Grand Theft Auto, which we talked about at the top of the episode.

Doom was so big in like,

I, I, Doom got mentioned on Friends, which is like, it's like, it was like that level of

awareness and the general culture in a time when people weren't, uh, you know, when video games were not nearly as mainstream as they are today.

Friends, by the way, was a sitcom that aired in the 1990s.

The kids know friends.

They got, they, Ranch, do you know friends?

Ranch doesn't care about us.

Ranch, do you know friends?

I know friends.

Okay, great.

Who's your favorite friend?

Chandler.

Yeah, Chandler.

Chandler is the one who mentions Doom on, also plays Crash Team Racing in another episode.

Anyway,

like Grand Theft Auto, it was played, I think, by a lot of people who don't otherwise play games.

And as such, people just came in wanting pure power fantasy.

And so you just type in the cheat code and then you could just fucking do whatever.

I didn't mess with the cheat codes in Doom, to my knowledge.

I did mess with them in Rise of the Triad because in Rise of the Triad, you could enter God mode and your gun would be replaced by a glowing hand that would be extended out in front of you and you would just like gesture towards people and they would like burst into flames or explode.

And I was like, that's a great implementation of a power fantasy is that like you don't even need a gun anymore.

You could just like look at people.

In Doom, like I, you know, you'd hop in, you'd bring up the terminal, you type in id KFA or id DQD, and you basically, id KFA, which I think was a, what the fuck was it?

Was it killed fucking everything?

I think it might have been that.

Kill fucking all of them?

I think it was.

I think it was, that was what the acronym stood for.

But, you know, id DQD would turn on God mode, and id KFA would give you all the weapons and

armor and ammo.

And then you could just, like, fucking massacre all these

all these Keiko demons and so forth.

And then also id clip, which was, would let you walk through walls, was the no-clip version.

Wow.

Also introduced the terminology of clipping.

I feel like people didn't never taught, like, like that's where people, when gamers started saying, the, saying clipping to refer to the idea of

sorting errors in games.

I think as a result, I think clip now

came to mean the opposite of what it originally meant.

I think it's one of those linguistic things.

What?

Were you no clip?

Yeah, no clipping.

Is passing through an object.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whereas clipping used to be passing through an object.

Or vice versa.

Like you're clipping into something.

Right.

Yeah.

I don't fucking know.

I don't know.

Well, you want me to think I'm going to know something?

I don't fucking know.

Just the way people knew about clipping in like the mid-2010s, early 2020s was through the

like YouTube interactive horror sequences called like

the back rooms.

And it would be like, I no no-clipped into a nightmare place.

Right.

And all of that language sources its etymology from Doom.

I mean, it's the first place I heard it.

And I think that's as such, it's probably where it made its way onto, you know, into forums and

into the gaming

lingo at all.

I think the,

we got to talk about the shotgun, great shotgun, great feel to it in Doom.

Amazing when you first get the chain gun.

Also amazing when you first get the chainsaw.

And chainsaws have become such a staple of video games.

I mean, I think they probably would have anyway just because of their presence in horror,

you know,

the horror genre.

But I don't know, there's something about the Doom chainsaw.

That kind of I feel like just established that there's going to be a chainsaw on something.

I mean, Gears of War having the chainsaw gun is just like naturally is like a direct line from it, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the first time you see the chainsaw in Doom, if you're playing like sort of organically, is through a window.

So you're like, oh shit, I think that's a chainsaw, but you have no idea how to get to it.

I think for me, for my money, chainsaw may be a very impractical weapon, actually.

I don't think I'd actually want to use a chainsaw in close combat now.

Yeah, too heavy.

You got to swing that thing.

You're more likely going to chainsaw your own leg or arm off.

Let's tell that to the chainsaw lobby.

I mean, I'm trying.

They won't, they won't let me, they won't let me speak.

I keep trying to get, I keep trying to filibuster and they won't let me do it.

I think the best way to wield a chainsaw isn't swinging, but to kind of like push it backwards against your own like stomach or chest

and then just run at people.

God, I'd fucking hate to get chainsaw.

I mean,

I suck.

Yeah.

Really bad.

Because if you survive, it's a long road to recovery.

Yeah.

And whatever I got chainsawed, it's never going to be the same afterwards.

Yeah.

It's going to be all fucked up.

It's not going to be like you're just like, hey, what do you have to get a scar?

I got fucking chainsawed, but I'm doing all right now.

How small would a chainsaw have to be for you to touch it?

Like with my finger?

Yeah.

Just to try it a little bit.

Like, is it paperclip-sized chainsaw that's running?

Is that too much?

Is that too big?

Because you'd be like, ow.

Or, or is it, or is it, it's okay?

Because it'd be like basically a paper cut.

I hear the paper, paper, like it's on.

It's on.

It's a paper clip sized chainsaw.

Would you touch it and be like, I wonder what that's like?

I feel like I'd try it out on like a sheet of paper just to see what happened.

Okay, I'm looking for the size.

at which you touch the chainsaw.

I just reach my finger out and say, yeah, what's that chainsaw like?

You got to think about this though, right?

Like, because like any sort of like mechanical blade is going to hurt.

Like, even like if you clip yourself with like a electric razor or something, that fucking hurts.

Right.

I don't want to touch a running electric razor.

Sure.

So I guess probably pretty fucking small the the point of a pencil

a little little tiny baby chainsaw heather just tell us how small your chainsaw is and just hit nick with it already

i guess if a chain if a running chainsaw is the tip of a pencil i might touch it out of curiosity yeah there it is so there's the size yeah now we know How small does the chainsaw have to be?

This was a new segment.

Here's the thing.

0.5 millimeters, I guess.

How big would that be?

How big is is a tip of a pen?

Nick was always going to touch it, no matter what.

Yeah, I've touched that thing.

The rocket launcher, rocket launchers become, again, such a thing in video games.

I think largely because of Doom.

One of the craziest things in Doom is that when you shoot a barrel and it explodes, that the monsters explode in the...

like away from the direction of the of the barrel.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Like there's like a physics to

the way the explosion rips through them that kind of knocks them sideways and that was a magic trick when you're when you first played doom yeah and i mean again just explosive barrels in general i feel like become more standardized because they're so present here i mean it's established so many conventions that just exist in in games also just like the thing about the the doom games is they're just so fucking dumb like yeah like like the bfg is like the the ultimate weapon you get and stands for big fucking gun it's like the b big fucking gun 9000.

it's that

but it's dumb as shit but it's great it's at that right threshold yeah for it being dumb and awesome where you're kind of like this is this rocks so matt you messed around with with doom 2016 doom eternal yeah i definitely played you know doom to the direct sequel which again was just kind of more of the same i messed around with some doom 64 which i think for a lot of i think they're i think doom 64 is maybe a bigger game than it gets credit for because i think a lot of people, gamers who didn't necessarily have access to PC gaming, but were playing GoldenEye on

their Nintendo 64s were like, oh, okay, let's mess around with this Doom 64 game.

Let's see what all the fuss is about Doom.

I think it just being on that platform and that sort of establishing that you could play a console FPS.

I think it made it maybe a little bit more of a consequential game than you might think.

Doom 3, I remember playing when it came out, and I remember how hyped it was for it.

And the thing thing about Doom 3 is it was

a just really stunning

technological achievement, and there was a lot of artistry to it,

to its art direction.

But

the game just kind of felt dated when you were playing it.

And I guess my big thing is

Doom is so arcadey.

Doom 3 tries to have a little bit more, be a little bit more fully, like fleshed out beyond that, but it does kind of of like honor its roots to a large degree.

And by that point, you'd had like Half-Life and maybe even Half-Life 2.

I think Half-Life 2 did predate Doom 3.

And those games felt so like more expansive and had such better realized worlds and like actual characters in them.

Like they felt like such

deeper, more immersive experiences while still being FPS.

that again, it just kind of felt like that franchise kind of got left behind until it's modern reinvention.

It's hard to encapsulate everything about Doom because, again,

it's like talking about doing an episode about Street Fighter 2.

It's like, how are you, can you possibly be comprehensive about everything when you're talking about a game that is somewhere in the top 10 in terms of most influential games ever made?

The fact that you can download it and play it today on a PlayStation 5.

There are so many other games that were released in 1993 that you cannot just go on PlayStation 5 and be like, I'm going to play this.

That's how big the the shadow the footprint of doom is is that this morning I was like oh, I bet I could play this on PlayStation and there it was like sure enough like

free to play yeah, I mean it became something of a moom right

meme yeah, it became something of a meme right a doom meme a moom a moom that's

a mistake

that's pretty good It became something of a moom that you know, can you run doom on it, right?

Yeah.

Just like the idea that people just started to try to to to run doom on on absolutely i there's a subreddit there's a subreddit it runs doom that's just for trying to get i believe i saw it running on a refrigerator well let's not get too let's not get too crazy because maybe uh maybe some of this might come up in a segment later or something oh okay all right okay i mean later it could be now maybe it's gonna come up in a segment right now maybe let's hear it wait are any of the any other thoughts on doom like to do it i just want to make sure we haven't missed anything major or

everyone got a chance to say everything they were hoping to say.

I would like to say that I've made a big show of not being scared of video games here in the modern world.

Yeah.

Doom was the last video game I remember being actually scared of.

Again, it's hard to convey this because you look at it now and it looks so quaint and silly, but it was,

I think, like a large part, again, due to the sound design.

It was a scary experience if you're playing this as a kid in 1993.

Yeah,

as a child, I'm playing Doom and I would go to bed and I would be scared a little bit.

Yeah, and I think because

it doesn't have, I think a big thing is like games now just have so much more sophisticated lighting.

Yeah.

And like there isn't, this game doesn't really convey like

the menace of darkness in the same way.

It just wasn't technologically capable of doing it.

So like that's part of why it feels a little bit more cartoony.

And also the palette is part of that.

But still, it was just like at the time,

it felt so much more visceral and so much more intense and just immersive by nature of its first person perspective.

And that's what made it so terrifying to play.

I would like to speak on the movie just for a quick second, if I can.

Yeah, please.

So yeah, we covered the movie back in the premium DLC days of the show,

available on patreon.com slash get played.

And the movie is to Doom as

Spirits Within is to Final Fantasy,

where it's sort of like it's just called that, and it doesn't really have that much in common with it, like aesthetically or anything like that.

And it's fucking

dog shit.

It's really, really bad.

Bad movie.

And then there's a second one called Doom Annihilation, which I have not seen, but

from what I gather, it has a higher Rotten Tomatoes score

than the original movie, which is not hard to do.

The original one has 18%.

Right.

And

the Doom Annihilation Straight to DVD movie has like a 5 out of 10, 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it seem like

it could be an Oscar contender comparatively.

Well, I'm glad that we're not still doing the old format because we don't ever have to watch it.

No, we'll probably watch it at some point.

Yeah, let's watch it.

I think we should watch it.

Why?

Oh, God, no.

It would be kind of funny if we watched it.

It would be funny if we watched it.

No.

How about a segment?

Let's do a segment.

Let's do it, Matt.

Okay, I'm going to name an item, and you're going to tell me if you think Doom can run on it.

It's time for Doom or Boom.

Okay, and so how this is going to work is

if you think the item that I name can run Doom, you'll give it a Doom.

You'll say Doom.

And then if

you don't think it can run Doom, you'll say Boom.

Because the idea of it running Doom will make it blow up because it doesn't work.

Now, matt i have to ask because this seems really familiar this seems basically just an inversion of the existing boom or doom from the costco guys is that what this is a riff on it's exactly what it is nick okay got it got it having a little fun so doom or boom yeah

it kind of seems different enough where like we can't get in trouble No, it seems like its own thing.

And can we do the boom thing if we say give something a boom?

Yeah, I think that's a, we can, we can can do the boom for sure.

Got it.

What does that mean?

You'll see.

I think we'll see.

You'll see.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, here we go.

Here we go.

Can Doom run on a Game Boy color?

I'll say Doom.

Doom.

Yeah, you're correct.

It cannot run on a Game Boy color.

Somebody got it.

Wait, what?

Wait, explain.

Doom, like, Doom means it can't.

Oh, wait, no.

Whoops, I forgot.

Incorrect.

It cannot run on a Game Boy Color, actually.

The individual cartridges for the Game Boy Color don't have enough processing power.

Somebody did a modified cart and got Wolfenstein running on one, but they had to add stuff to an existing Game Boy cart.

So as is, you cannot do it.

So no points so far.

Can you run Doom within the game Sonic Mania?

I'll say Doom.

I will also say Doom.

Which means yes.

Yes.

You guys, you can play Doom in Sonic Mania with a mod.

You have to mod the game, but you can, it can be done.

And it takes some doing, but after that, it's fine.

You can do it.

Okay, great.

So now you both have a point.

How about this one?

Matt, it feels like your source for this is a dream you had.

What if you could play Doom in Sonic Mania?

Oh, man, you know what?

Sonic Mania is great, but you know what would be cool if you could play Doom in it?

That'd be sick.

It'd be so sick.

It'd be awesome if I had a girlfriend.

And that girlfriend was Tails.

Yeah.

This next one, a pregnancy test.

Can it run Doom?

What kind of pregnancy test?

Like one with like a sort of digital output.

Okay, so we don't have a brand?

We just have a pregnancy test?

Just pregnancy test?

I'm going to say Doom because I think the likelihood of Matt naming a pregnancy test that for as like a thing to throw us off seems less likely than that you could run Doom on a pregnancy test.

Yeah, it's hard not to metagame it a little bit.

I think I would also lean Doom here.

You can do it.

There's a certain type of pregnancy test that has like a tiny sort of, you know, computing display, but it's like, it's just like a digital one.

It's not like the two-line, the two-line.

Man, can you imagine?

You pee on a stick and then Doom shows up.

You're like, oh my God, what happened?

What's going on with me?

I don't think I'm pregnant.

I think something else is happening.

My urethra is a portal to hell.

Okay, how about this?

A gas pump display.

I mean, I feel like I've just seen this.

So I'll say Doom.

I'm going to, just so that we get some variation here, I'm going to go boom.

Kaboom.

Do you want to to do it that way, Heather?

Do you want to do that?

I don't know the other way.

I don't.

You guys are referencing something I don't know.

At some point, I'll do a boom and you can kind of get the gist of it.

Okay.

I found no compelling evidence that you can do it at a gas pump display.

Wow.

Wow.

So Heather gets a point.

So Heather gets the point.

Holy shit.

Wow.

What's the score?

It's, I think it's 4-3, Heather.

Got it.

Here we go.

How about this?

A vape.

A vape?

A vape.

A vape.

Yeah, how about this?

Like, maybe I don't know what a vape is because I'm picturing a vape.

Does a vape have any sort of readout?

Some of them do.

Some of the fancy high-tech ones can maybe be a more advanced model.

So this is a vape with a screen.

I'm going

doom.

I think this probably is a doom, but I'm going to try to see if I can stite this point.

I'm going to say,

boom.

So

it's just like an emphatic boom?

Yeah, well, it's kind of a flex.

Oh, you got a flex.

You gotta kind of do a flex, too.

Yeah.

It is, in fact, not a boom.

It is a Doom.

There's a vape with the sort of, yeah,

a display that can be programmed to run Doom.

How about this?

So now, yeah, another point for Heather.

We got 5-3 here.

A PDF.

This one I feel like I've seen.

I'm going to say Doom.

I'm also going to say Doom because I feel like I've seen it.

Okay, yeah, you can't play Doom in a PDF.

This is kind of crazy.

The thing about this game is like, it's not really about winning.

It's kind of like, it's kind of just crazy information.

Sure.

Yeah.

A PDF?

That's for typing and looking at stuff.

It's for, yeah, it's for distribution.

It's for reading.

PDF.

More like BFG.

I give that a...

Boom.

Yellow.

Boom.

Boom.

He called his own shot and he took it.

I love it.

Okay, what about this?

A Sega VMU?

Oh, boy.

If you can't run it on a Game Boy Color, but then I wonder if there's some sort of, hmm, like, are you running it off of maybe the Dreamcast

and getting it up on the VMU?

Is there some sort of kluge

workaround?

I'm going to hate myself for getting it wrong because I love the Sega Dreamcast.

But I'm going to go boom.

I feel like you would see this running on a VMU.

Boom.

I guess I'm not quite picturing how it's technically possible, but I'm going to say doom.

Can't do it.

Wow.

You can't run it on a damn VMU.

Sorry, Haddon.

Wow.

But you are.

You were right, but sorry that the VMU can't do it, I guess is what I said.

That's okay.

It's a strange segment.

I'm so confused.

Look.

We do lose something when two-thirds of us are in the room and one of us is somewhere else.

There's like a, there is like a, your guys are like, I don't want to say where I am.

You're not that far away from me anyway.

But there is like, you know, there's a there's a bit of a distance it definitely feels like you're on the other side of a webcam and sick yeah no 100 yes and yeah this so my mind is infected

uh i got i got one more for you great an ipod shuffle what's the score uh heather wins no matter what okay well so there's the so there i should just say what's in my heart i think probably doom i bet you can run it on an ipod shuffle i don't think the shuffle has a screen oh does the shuffle not have a screen Oh, no, that's the nano.

The shuffle does have a screen.

I have no idea.

I'm going to say Doom also.

You can't do it.

The shuffle don't got no screen.

Wow.

The shuffle is the one with most screen.

I did a little trick.

Wow.

I was hoping you wouldn't remember which one didn't have a screen.

That hurts me more than the Dreamcast is that I don't remember that the shuffle has no screen and the nano does.

Yeah, the nano.

The nano has a

screen.

Yeah.

But

the shuffle was the the one that was like the little clip-on.

Yeah, yeah, pretty cool design, actually.

Honestly, it's the same size as the fucking Apple Watch.

Yeah, they're like, what if the whole thing was a screen, actually?

Yeah,

and that's doom.

That's doom or boom.

We won't do it again because it's kind of the only time it would be, it would make sense to do it.

But I had a little fun making that.

That was a lot of fun.

I'm looking at this right.

I'm looking at the subreddit now, the it runs doom or it runs doom.

And yeah, they got a

Next TurboColor workstation running it.

They got a

Motorola Razor with Doom with Doom on it.

There's a supermarket weighting scale with Doom.

See, it's always crazy stuff.

This is kind of great.

I'm sure that people have run it on the back of an airplane.

Yeah, this one I've seen, Google Sheets.

It's running in there.

Yep.

Digital picture frame.

Yep.

Running on Apple's Lightning to HDMI dongle.

Yeah, I'm going to sound like the fucking whale here for a second.

People are amazing.

It's great that people do this.

I don't know.

It's amazing that people think this is.

I thought you didn't say, I want a meatball sub and want to jack off.

Hey, that's this week's Get Played.

Our producer is Rochelle Chen.

Ranch, yard underscore underscore sard.

You back up streaming ranch?

I am.

And I just finished Resident Evil 7 last night.

Wow.

Speaking of scary games, what did you think?

I loved it.

Wow.

I thought it was very fun.

What's next?

I don't know.

We're going to spin a wheel.

Wait, you're going to spin a wheel?

You're going to use RNG of your own?

Wrench number generator?

I love if Jigsaw

used one of his own puzzles to do something for himself.

It's like, what the heck?

The reverse bear trap on yourself?

What are you doing?

I've put a reverse bear trap on my own head.

You're like in the room.

You're like, what?

If it goes off before I can undo it, then I'll tell you what your game is.

Otherwise,

you can leave.

Jingsa, I think you're in the weeds, dude.

Our music is by Ben Prenty, BenPruntyMusic.com.

Our art is by Duck Brigade Design, DuckBrigade.com.

We're going to be out of town for the next couple of weeks, but we will be releasing new episodes out of our backlog.

So they won't be timely, but they will be new.

And then we'll be back in June, first week of June, with our mother three, We Play, You Play.

You can find our merch at kinshipgoods.com.

Link in the show description, and also check out Get Anime, our sisters show on Patreon.

Matt, what are we doing this week?

It's it's uh it's animehem, baby.

We're we're we're trucking right along, and who knows what we're gonna watch?

It's gonna be sick because you guys suggested all the anime for the for the wheel, and I know y'all are a bunch of freaks.

Yes, that's right.

These are listeners suggested anime that are selected.

We select one episode per random and watch it live on the show and react to it.

One episode per week.

Per week.

Randomly.

Randomly, yes.

That's over at patreon.com/slash get played.

And hey, you know what?

Got played.

What's that?

Doom.

Wow.

More than 10 million times.

I think I at least sold 10 million units.

That's, I'm not a journalist.

I don't know.

Yeah, we don't fucking know.

What do you want us to do?

Know something?

We don't know anything.

300 million units.

That was a hit head gum podcast.